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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25093153">Jade and Namine: Compare notes about Replicas</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarsneezes/pseuds/rarsneezes'>rarsneezes</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>don't you worry child [8]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Kingdom Hearts, Tales of Graces, Tales of the Abyss</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Crossover Shenanigans, Gen, and sophie and namine are quite confident in their existence, jade doesn't know anyone here well enough to get existential with them, this isn't actually as serious it might sound</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 03:21:02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,309</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25093153</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarsneezes/pseuds/rarsneezes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>on the topic of artificially created life, featuring Sophie Lhant, Jade Curtiss, and Namine (KH).</p><p>or: the other half of Team A meets </p><p>[DYWC]</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jade Curtiss &amp; Sophie Lhant</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>don't you worry child [8]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1414204</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Jade and Namine: Compare notes about Replicas</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>housekeeping: Namine is from my KH series FtPverse, which actually means she herself is a replica! and also her backstory looks nothing like canon KH Namine's! (ftpverse summary <a href="https://rarsneezes.dreamwidth.org/24351.html">here</a>, OR you can check out Namine's bio <a href="https://dywc.dreamwidth.org/961.html">here</a>)</p><p>housekeeping 2: Jade and Sophie know each other becuase they were a bonus boss together in Zesteria, and yes I will milk that as well as (Sophie voice) "my uncle, who is a fonist" as much as possible. was it a mistranslation? i don't care</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Namine is quite glad she wore leggings under her skirt today—though a part of her wishes she’d worn shorts, or <em>pants</em>—because it’s making the whole carefully-navigating-a-small-mountain-trail thing a little bit easier. Of course, if she’d <em>known </em>she was going to end up tossed into some world she didn’t recognize and required to interact with people she didn’t know, she might have just stayed in bed.</p><p>At least the company is nice. Or, it’s <em>okay. </em>Sophie seems like a nice girl; she can’t be <em>that </em>much younger than Namine, but Namine swears she acts like it sometimes. But then, there’s something familiar about that innocence, too, something that Namine might be able to place if she knew Sophie for longer than the hour they’d been together so far.</p><p>As for Jade, well. Namine’s had worse company. And Jade seems… <em>fine</em>, all things considered, but Namine is also distinctly aware that Jade is intentionally making it hard to get a good read on him, and she doesn’t have the energy to try figure him out. The two things Namine <em>has </em>figured out about him are 1) he’s incredibly smart, given the theories he was suggesting about how they all got here and, 2) Kairi would call him a bitch.</p><p>Oh and, 3: he and Sophie know each other.</p><p>Namine wasn’t not paying attention as much as she simply didn’t fully understand the conversation they had about it, but what she gathered is that this is not the first time the two of them have been ripped away from their home universes and tossed elsewhere. And despite being from two separate universes, this is the second time they’ve been tossed into each other’s figurative laps.</p><p>Namine feels a little bit like an outlier, here, but she tries not to stress about it too much. After all, being an outlier in the group is not nearly as worrying as the fact her star shard doesn’t appear to work and she has frankly no idea how to get home!</p><p>(<em>If she hadn’t gotten out of bed today, would that have even saved her from this nonsense? Probably not.</em>)</p><p>“What about you, Namine?” Sophie asks.</p><p>“Hm?” Namine asks back, looking up. Sophie and Jade are a little bit ahead of her and—oh, good, the path is widening out enough that she won’t have to be so careful about her footing. Anyway, Sophie has paused just long enough to look at Namine, her head politely tilted.</p><p>“Oh, I was asking about your hometown!” Sophie says. “I wanted to learn about where you grew up.”</p><p>Namine blinks a few times, hesitating.</p><p>She’s a Replica, of course. She doesn’t have a place she grew up. She doesn’t really have any <em>growing up </em>under her belt, either—these past two years she’s been alive are probably the closest thing she’ll have a childhood. But then, she probably doesn’t need to advertise the Replica thing… Oh, what would Kairi do?</p><p>“Well,” Namine begins, probably much too late to be believable, “I live on an island.”</p><p>“An island?” Sophie asks, sounding somewhere between awed and delighted. She walks backwards as she keeps talking—Jade watching her closely, eyes narrowed, but not discouraging her. “How big of an island?”</p><p>Namine keeps walking, too. “A ten minute walk to the beach no matter where you are?” she offers, because she doesn’t know how many miles it is and that’s probably easier to conceptualize. Of course, that might not be <em>true, </em>but it’s close enough to get her point across.</p><p>“Whoa…” Sophie says.</p><p>Jade turns his attention to Namine, considering. She ducks her head down under the excuse of needing to watch her footing, though she doesn’t. It’s just hard to do otherwise, under a gaze as sharp as his.</p><p>“I suppose you must’ve learned how to swim rather young, then,” he comments, and Namine can <em>hear </em>the smile in his tone.</p><p>The hell does that have to do with anything, Namine wonders.</p><p>“Uh, yeah,” she answers, maybe another second too slow, but… whatever! She <em>could </em>tell them she’s a Replica, she guesses, but it can’t matter that much to either of them. And there’s no way they can be <em>anticipating </em>that she’s not—</p><p>“Unless you don’t know how to swim,” Jade presses and the first thing Namine thinks is if Kairi were here she would punch him, and the second thing she thinks is <em>why the hell does he care.</em></p><p>“Of course I do,” Namine snaps, then immediately chokes on her anger. She squeezes her eyes shut and stands very still for a moment, counting slowly and deliberately up to ten. It’s—a perfectly valid thing to be angry about, and it’s <em>okay </em>to be angry but she <em>hates how her anger climbs up her throat, insidious, flicking switches in her mind that shouldn’t exist. </em>She hates how it makes her feel like someone else, someone she <em>doesn’t want to be</em>—</p><p>“Jade, that was mean,” Sophie scolds, glaring up at him. They’ve come to a stop, too.</p><p>Jade shrugs. “You’re right,” he agrees. “If Namine wants to lie about her hometown, that’s her business.”</p><p>Namine bristles. She’s not sure if she’s grateful she feels sick instead of angry or not.</p><p>“I mean, Jade’s been lying about his,” Sophie adds.</p><p>“When I say absolutely nothing worth recounting happened during my childhood and that my hometown is hardly a vacation spot it is the absolute truth,” Jade insists.</p><p>“Well <em>maybe </em>I just want to know because it’s about you,” Sophie argues.</p><p>Jade sighs and fixes his glasses.</p><p>Namine decides that if the truth is going to give her less reason to get frustrated, then she might as well. “Look,” she says, and her heart is in her throat and she feels frozen to the spot but who cares. It’s not like it’s a <em>bad </em>thing she’s a Replica, it’s just weird to explain. “I just… I’m only two years old, really. So I don’t exactly have a <em>childhood.</em>”</p><p>“Whoa,” Sophie says, immediately. “That’s younger than I am!”</p><p>The words make Namine pause for a second, because she’s smart enough to do the math there and realize that maybe Sophie is like she is—if she was significantly younger than she looked, it’d explain the air about her that Namine first pegged as innocence, even though it’s really just the <em>hasn’t been alive long enough to interact with quite everything in the worlds yet</em>; something Namine is very familiar with.</p><p>“I’d wondered,” Jade admits, before Namine can find any footing. “Of course it was more of a hunch than anything truly concrete—we’ve barely known each other an hour, after all.”</p><p>Namine looks between the two of them, startled. At least it’s distracting her from her anger. “You… Do you guys have Replicas, in your universes?”</p><p>Jade’s expression goes very, very tight. “Yes, actually,” he answers.</p><p>“We don’t,” Sophie says, before Namine can think much about the face Jade is making. “But I’m something called Protos Heis—”</p><p>She’s barely finished saying the words before Jade interjects.</p><p>“We’ve been over this, Sophie,” he says, sounding somewhat annoyed. “You are not a thing, nor do you have any obligation to refer to yourself by a name other than the one you chose.”</p><p>Despite herself, Namine reassesses her initial judgement on Jade. Sophie, meanwhile, looks confused rather than upset at being scolded.</p><p>“I was just trying to explain…” she begins.</p><p>“And yet I’m quite certain your words meant absolutely nothing to Namine, so you might as well use words that are more accurate,” Jade argues.</p><p>“Oh,” Sophie says, like she hadn’t thought of that. She’s very quiet for a moment, thinking it over, and then she says, very carefully: “I was <em>created, </em>instead of born. And I was created to destroy Lambda, which I guess makes me a weapon…? But I think I prefer just being Asbel’s daughter.”</p><p>Namine cannot really help the fondness, the sense of kinship she feels, hearing something like that. Privately, she thinks Riku would love Sophie.</p><p>“So that makes me and you the same, Namine,” Sophie says, brightly.</p><p>Namine laughs, short and bright. “Yeah, I guess so,” she agrees—she <em>had </em>been built with a purpose in mind, she supposes, even if she was never at any point used for that purpose, having been stolen away from the Organization before they could ever try.</p><p>(<em>But they tried something else later, didn’t they, Namine?</em></p><p>She’s not going to think about that.)</p><p>“Can I ask you a question, Namine?” Jade asks.</p><p>Namine blinks up at him, a little worried by his tone, but mostly grateful for the distraction. “Uh, sure,” she tells him.</p><p>“Do you know much about how Replicas are made, in your world?”</p><p>“Not… the specifics,” Namine admits, to Jade’s apparent dismay. “There’s a computer in Castle Oblivion that does all the work—but I never bothered asking <em>how</em>.” Now she wishes she had, because she’s curious; how <em>does </em>it work, in her world? Certainly any of the Vexen Replicas she knows would be more than willing to talk her ear off about it for hours; and if not them, then Even.</p><p>“I suppose that only makes sense,” Jade allows, adjusting his glasses.</p><p>Namine wonders if maybe they should start moving again—they are pretty close to the bottom of the mountain, after all—but doesn’t get the chance to ask.</p><p>“One more question,” Jade says, “and perhaps an awkward one at that, but you’ll have to forgive my curiosity. But do you know anything about your original? Where she is, if she’s still alive?”</p><p>Namine blinks. “Uh, she’s still alive,” she answers, though she wonders if she should even <em>call </em>the other Namine her “original”, seeing as she was created from Riku’s memories, and not the other Namine’s data, as far as she’s aware. But then, a question Jade has about <em>her </em>“original” is probably the same question he might have about, say, Riku’s original, and the “Real” Riku is also alive and well as far as Namine was last aware of. Of course, it’s difficult to be in consistent contact across universes, but… whatever Jade’s asking after cannot <em>just </em>be about her whereabouts. There’s no way.</p><p>“I see,” Jade says.</p><p>“Is there a reason you thought she might not be?” Namine asks, too curious now to let it drop.</p><p>Jade sighs.</p><p>“It appears there’s a fundamental difference in how Replicas are created in our respective worlds,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate. He does hum, though. “Unless you are some kind of unique case, Namine.”</p><p>She shakes her head—she <em>is, </em>but not with regards to her original being alive, and the implications of that: “I’m sorry do you mean to tell me—what, that you really expected my original to be dead? Is that a thing in your world?”</p><p>Jade doesn’t answer for long enough for Sophie to lean forward to better gauge his expression.</p><p>“Uncle Jade?” she asks. “Are you mad?”</p><p>“I’m not mad,” Jade says, in the sort of way that implies he might be upset, though.</p><p>“You look mad.”</p><p>Jade shoves his hands in his pockets, his gaze fixed somewhere on the horizon well away from them all. “It’s just interesting,” he says. “To consider the differences between our worlds. I won’t go into detail, but the process of replicating living things usually leaves the original dead, in my world. Very few survive the data extraction process.”</p><p>It’s like a glass of ice water dumped down the back of Namine’s shirt.</p><p>“That’s horrible…” Sophie whispers.</p><p>“It’s why fomicry is illegal—Ah, fomicry is what we call the process of replicating things in my world.”</p><p>Namine still shivers, understanding why Jade’s been acting the way he has since she mentioned being a Replica. If he thought her existence had killed someone… She shudders again at the thought, and gratefully lets her mind latch onto the one thing she didn’t understand in what Jade just said.</p><p>“Illegal?” her mouth asks, though she feels somewhat distant. “What does that mean?”</p><p>Jade blinks at her.</p><p>“It means it’s against the law,” Sophie explains diligently, which also means nothing to Namine.</p><p>“Law?”</p><p>“They’re rules that kings make,” Sophie says. “Sometimes lords make them too. It’s Asbel’s least favorite part of the job…”</p><p>Okay, rule, Namine understands that one.</p><p>“What’s… the difference between a rule and a law?” she asks, though, because she doesn’t actually understand why it being made by a king matters. Like… kings are in charge of worlds she guesses? So it’s a rule for the world?? But she only knows one king and doesn’t know what kind of rules exist in Mickey’s world. Nor can she say much for any laws that exist on Destiny Islands—if they have any? She doesn’t think they do. Like, she lives with the mayor. If they had laws, she’d know?</p><p>Anyway.</p><p>“Do you really want a full breakdown of Malkuth’s legal system?” Jade asks. “Because I’m not sure I really have the stamina for a lecture; after all, we still have to climb down the rest of this mountain.”</p><p>Namine considers that, and then decides that as confused as she is, maybe she doesn’t care <em>that </em>much? It sounds needlessly complicated already.</p><p>“Can you just tell me what happens when someone does fomicry and they aren’t supposed to.”</p><p>“Believe me, the consequences for that are better not discussed with people I just met,” Jade answers, and his smile is—deadly.</p><p>“But you didn’t just meet <em>me</em>,” Sophie argues.</p><p>Jade claps his hands together, ignoring Sophie completely. “Let’s continue, shall we? We still have to figure out where we are.” And before either of the girls can say anything, he starts making his way back down the mountain at a brisk pace.</p><p>That’s fine, Namine thinks. She’s not sure she <em>did </em>want to know, if he was smiling like that about it.</p>
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